Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: a Western Religious History (review)

Rosemary Radford Ruether's investigation of the life and variety of divine femininities takes the reader on an immense voyage. It really is a "Western Religious History." Contrary to expectations forged in Lyotard's "mistrust of grand narratives," the narrative proves humbly rivetting, indeed trusty. Its excitement is emitted not so much by the grandeur of the sweep as by a familiar Ruetheran rhythm: a high-speed movement through history propelled back and forward by an urgently dedicated hope. Ruether has long looped hope for the freedom and dignity of all women, by way of her firm turn to ecofeminist theology in the early 1980s, into the encompassing work of hope for the future of all earthlings. "Goddesses," the trope, serves as a lens—one more of many lenses in her vast hermeneutical repertory—for focusing contemporary forms of that hope. With her encyclopedic specificity and her indomitable lucidity, she guides the reader on a panoramic investigation whose itinerary moves from prehistorical gender, through the ancient Mediterranean goddesses, the Hebrew God and gender, the savior goddesses of mystery religions and gnosticism, early Christianity's femininities, those of medieval religion, the encounter of Aztec and Christian female symbols, the loss of Mary in Protestantism and the rediscovery of Wisdom in Protestant mysticism, the nineteenth-century matriarchal hypothesis, and the twentieth-century return of the Goddess.

Why? Ruether has remained a firmly if subversively Christian feminist—going so far as to enunciate a God/ess, but never a Goddess. Yet this book is at pains to undo a misunderstanding of her feminism that still circulates, a decontextualized overreading that forever pits her historicist theology against what Carol Christ dubbed thealogy (1980). This tension between the internal Christian reform of Godtalk and the post-Christian reconstruction of a lost Goddess tradition was terribly important to my generation of feminist religious thinkers; we would take indignant sides—until some new split opened on an unexpected flank (as with "womanisms"). Or we would queasily try to avoid sides. So it was already a curative moment when Ruether in Sexism and Godtalk launched the metaphor of "God/ess." But the binary habit persisted, reinforcing postmodern skepticism as to the possibility of any encompassing narrative of universal liberation.

Is that what she is offering now? Well, sure, in a way. I think it will not give away the plot if I cite from its conclusion, where she calls for—and adroitly characterizes—"a common ecofeminist theology." It "not only sustains the cycling seasons" attended to by commitments to goddesses or to ecofeminism but "also empowers us to struggle against the hierarchies of dominance and to seek to re-create relationships of mutuality." This is vintage Ruether, combining nature and history, wisdom and prophecy, ecology and politics, indeed female and male: "this divine energy for life and renewal of life in and through all things can be imaged as female or male in ways that celebrate our diverse bodies and energies, rather than in ways that reinforce traditional gender stereotypes" (308). So the entire expedition through the history of female manifestations of the divine in the West serves the end of articulating—before it is too late—a theology, indeed an ecofeminism, capacious enough to ground a sturdier coalition of spiritually minded progressives. To this end, she briefly recapitulates her own theological evolution, correcting once and for all the polemical residues of earlier feminist debates, before proceeding to recapitulate, from the attractive and ambiguous angle of "goddesses," the history of the western world.

Ruether's wide-angle lens on the past is what allows her to swivel and call for the emergence of a wider ecumenical coalition, inclusive of those self-designated pagans—the largely nonacademic, ecologically engaged groups that academic and Christian feminists have so readily dismissed as essentialist, pagan romantic, ahistorical and so on. For she believes that "we share mostly common values;" and after all, "we are all being beaten with the same stick by fundamentalists, for whom 'lesbian...